Discussions on how to better tie service and sales have heated up lately. Although not a new topic, the industry has always recognized that the customer experience (CX) is defined across departments and needs to transcend their boundaries. But cross-departmental issues are hard to tackle. For most companies, better integrating service and sales has remained more of a guiding principle than something operationalized.
Things are changing, though. Many companies are leveraging the transition to the cloud to bring service and sales closer, and specifically onto the same communication platform.
Retention and loyalty are the two drivers behind the change. Forrester just elevated retention as a top 3 objective for CMOs in 2021:
- Renewals of subscriptions, recurring purchases, and repeat businesses depend on great service
- The service experience is playing a more prominent role in developing customer loyalty
- More businesses rely on upselling initiated by service to achieve their revenue goals
Acqueon is often asked about practical steps to bring service and sales closer together. The following is a selection of initiatives to consider.
- Unify customer contexts and communication technology across the two departments
- Get proactive with service, so that retention or upsell efforts are not viewed as coming “out of the blue” when customers are contacted
- Monitor customer sentiment and analyze churn risks, then implement automated retention campaigns based on the results
- Universally enable customer service agents to trigger upsell conversations and sales associates to assist customers
Open and proactive communication with customers around service-related topics paves the way to retaining and selling more products to your customers.